The Night-Sea Journey

Ancient Egyptian cosmology speaks of the sun's night-sea journey. At the end of each day, he returns to the earth's watery womb, from which he is reborn at dawn. In his Liber Novus or Red Book, Carl Jung depicts this journey: the solar disc in his small boat in a sea where monsters swim.

These monsters hold the archetypal energy of the unconscious, the depths we tap when we are sleeping.

The word archetype means simply "what was in the beginning," which was nothing but chaos and void. Creation is the work of differentiation. Thus archetypes take many forms, but are powered by the same primal energy.

Philemon, pictured here, appeared to Jung in a dream in 1913, which he records in Memories, Dreams, Reflections. The figure of a man with kingfisher wings, holding a bunch of keys. Not long after dreaming of him, Jung found a dead kingfisher, a rare sight in Zurich. The two trees in the image refer to the Greek myth of Philemon and Baucis, the husband and wife who offered hospitality to Zeus and Hermes at a time when the rest of the world was convulsed by its own wickedness. When Zeus flooded the valley below, he turned their hut into a temple, and at the end of their lives, they became trees: an oak and a linden, guarding the gateway to the Gods. A tree of life and a tree of knowledge.

The image Jung depicts as Philemon also represents the archetype of masculine wisdom. Because of his kingfisher wings, he suggests the Fisher King who casts his nets into the depths of wisdom and depravity and keeps the Holy Grail in its hidden castle.

The Fisher King represents an archetype of completeness. By taking the Grail unto himself rather than offering its regenerative powers to all, God curses him twice: the first time with impotence, meaning his masculinity has lost the capacity to give life, the second with immortality, because no one who holds the key to eternal life can ever hold death. His lands wither away, he lives in constant pain, and only an innocent who asks the right questions has the power to free him. His daughter is consigned to eternal, sterile virginity.

Jung lived in and documented an inner landscape at the moment European civilization began its descent into the abyss; when the Sun of Rationalism and Science faced the tehom, or fathomless depths. As an earth, we've been caught in the Night-Sea journey since 1914.

When the man puts on wings and leaves the woman, only the serpent remains. Or, if this were my picture, that's what it would say.